Monday, October 29, 2012

1210.7185 (M. Tremmel T. Fragos et al.)

Modeling the Redshift Evolution of the Normal Galaxy X-ray Luminosity Function    [PDF]

M. Tremmel T. Fragos, B. D. Lehmer, P. Tzanavaris, K. Belczynski, V. Kalogera, A. R. Basu-Zych, W. M. Farr, A. Hornschemeier, L. Jenkins, A. Ptak, A. Zezas
Emission from X-ray binaries (XRBs) is known to be a major component of the total X-ray luminosity of normal galaxies, so X-ray studies of high redshift galaxies allow us to probe the formation and evolution of X-ray binaries on very long timescales (10 Gyr). In this paper, we present results from large-scale population synthesis models of binary populations in galaxies from z = 0 to 20. We use as input into our modeling the Millennium II Cosmological Simulation and the updated semi-analytic galaxy catalog by Guo et al. (2011) to self-consistently account for the star formation history (SFH) and metallicity evolution of each galaxy. We run a grid of 192 models, varying all the parameters known from previous studies to affect the evolution of XRBs. We use the results from each model, along with observationally derived prescriptions for hot gas emission, to calculate the integrated X-ray luminosity of each galaxy in the catalog and create galaxy X-ray luminosity functions (XLFs) for several redshift bins. We compare our models with observed galaxy XLFs from Tzanavaris & Georgantopoulos (2008) and find that some of our models are able to reproduce their overall shape, normalization, and evolution. We use the results from our highest likelihood model to track the evolution of the normal galaxy X-ray luminosity density out to z = 4 and find that its evolution is driven largely by XRBs in galaxies with X-ray luminosities between 1e40 and 1e41 erg/s.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7185

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